Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [119]
No dynamite was immediately available this time, but the Zouaves had brought another fearsome weapon: machine guns. Once they began to fire, the Zouave gunners raked the front of the house from top to bottom. The heavy-caliber ammunition pierced the walls, forcing Garnier and Valet to take shelter in the cellar. Even from there, however, they could still see out and drive back anyone who dared approach. Hoping to end the siege more quickly than the previous one, Guichard equipped some of his men with sheet-metal shields, which unfortunately proved inadequate against the anarchists’ pistol shots.
Hours went by, and a supply of an older type of explosive, melinite (picric acid), arrived from the military base at Vincennes. Sappers trained to place combustible materials set off an explosion that shattered windows in nearby homes and virtually demolished the bandits’ hideout. Now, using machine-gun fire as cover, making the spotlighted scene an eerie precursor to the trench warfare that would engulf Europe two years later, the Zouaves and the police ran across open ground toward the house. They found the fugitives dazed and bleeding from a variety of wounds. At Guichard’s orders, they were summarily executed with a pistol shot through the head. As the bodies were carried from the house, the crowd — still assembled, though it was past midnight — tried to seize and lynch them. Afterward, souvenir seekers entered the bandits’ lair and dipped their handkerchiefs in the men’s blood.
When Valet’s family tried to claim his body, the police declared it was now the property of the state. Both men were buried in the anonymity of the paupers’ cemetery, near their comrades.
viii
The deaths of Bonnot, Garnier, and Valet did not bring the affair of the motor bandits to a close. Eighteen other men and three women had been accused by the police of complicity in the gang’s crimes. Raymond-la-Science Callemin and André Soudy were of course the principal members of the gang in custody, but the official net also dragged in those who had provided weapons, allowed their homes to be used as hideouts, or merely — as in the case of Victor Serge and his mistress, Rirette Maîtrejean — written articles that encouraged the gang’s activities. Besides various specific charges, all were accused of “criminal conspiracy” under one of the so-called Wicked Laws that were passed in 1894 in response to another famous anarchist act: Auguste Vaillant’s tossing a bomb onto the floor of the Chamber of Deputies.
Serge, who had earlier written so enthusiastically about the uses of violence, chose to emphasize some of his more moderate statements in his defense. Since the conspiracy evidence against him was strong, considering that he had been part of the communal household that included two of the principal bandits, Callemin and Garnier, Serge had to distance himself from them, as well as from the others who had assisted the robbers. In a letter to his successor as editor of l’anarchie, he wrote, “I am — we are — [he was including Rirette in his defense] disgusted, deeply aggrieved, to see that comrades — comrades that I have had affection for since their first and purest passions — could commit things as deplorable as the butchery of Thiais. I am heartbroken to see that the others, all the others, have